Offices Held

Biography

Hungerford and his younger brother were brought up by their half-brother, Sir Edward Hungerford†, subsequently a parliamentary commander in the Civil War. A barrister and a Presbyterian, he was elected for Great Bedwyn as a recruiter, but did not sit after Pride’s Purge and was excluded from the second Protectorate Parliament. At the general election of 1660 he was returned by a narrow majority for Marlborough, nine miles from Standen, where he lived with his widowed sister, Sarah Goddard, and her family. He was marked by Lord Wharton as a friend. His record in the Convention cannot always be distinguished from those of his brother and his nephew Edward Hungerford, but he was certainly the most experienced, and probably the most active ‘Mr Hungerford’ in the House. In the opening weeks of the Parliament he was appointed by full name to the elections committee and to those preparing the bill for the abolition of the court of wards and considering the indemnity bill; and he may have later served on 17 others, and made nine speeches. The Seymour interest was normally dominant in his constituency, and he appears to have challenged it at every opportunity, suggesting that Lord Hertford, as chancellor of Oxford University, should be told of the debate occasioned by his expulsion of the intruded dons. In the debate on the indemnity on 27 July he declared that ‘the Lords give great cause of jealousy in retarding the bill’, and proposed asking the King to hasten them. In the name of ‘prudence and moderation’, he urged the committal of the bill to settle ecclesiastical livings, and was named to the committee. He was appointed by full name to the committees on the bills for reparations to the royalist Marquess of Winchester and Earl of Bristol. His brother, who had married the widow of Richard Jervoise, was adversely affected by the first of these bills, and one or other of the brothers acted as teller against an order for the committee to sit.4

When Parliament reassembled after the recess, Hungerford lost no time in ingratiating himself with the Court by proposing a grant of £10,000 to Princess Henrietta and a day of fasting for the death of the Duke of Gloucester. But on 28 Nov. he made what seemed to the Anglican Seymour Bowman a very long speech in favour of giving statutory form to the Worcester House declaration for modified episcopacy:

All those who pretended so much loyalty should agree with the King’s desire, that they might all go down to the country and be well accepted there; which (he said) they could not better deserve than by setting this great affair in order before the dissolution.

Although Hertford, the lord lieutenant of Wiltshire, had died in October, Hungerford attacked the exorbitances of the lieutenancy, ‘averring to his knowledge in some places 2 s. 9 d. a day was exacted for each trooper’. On the proposal to reward Jane Lane for assisting Charles II to escape after the battle of Worcester, he remarked tartly that ‘by the many gifts they were bestowing he thought the House was making its will, and moved rather to give the money to the poor at the door’. He concluded his parliamentary career by acting as teller against receiving the report from the committee appointed to consider the case of another royalist sufferer, the Earl of Cleveland.5

Hungerford did not stand again, although he apparently remained on the Wiltshire commission of the peace until his death. Presumably, therefore, he conformed to the Church of England and raised no objections to enforcing the Conventicles Act in 1670. He died on 27 May 1673, and was buried at Hungerford at the cost of £200. In accordance with his will his brother and sister expended a further £150 on a memorial, which declared that ‘he lived a single, pious and unspotted life, [and] employed his time in the service of God and his country’.6